The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I put aside my nerves. I didn’t belong here, that much was obvious, in my plain wool uniform skirt and with Uptown manners, but if I showed that I was terrified of ending up an example to next year’s frosh—“Did you hear about Grayson? The crazy one who got taken by heretics?”—the citizens of the Nightfall Market would never help me find Conrad.

  Cal and I wound among the tents and stalls, made up of oddities and things that regular people would cast aside—fabric and metal and leather, stitched or riveted into a riot of color and odd shapes. The strange bit was, that haphazard as it first appeared, there was a sense of permanence to the place.

  A pretty redheaded girl smiled and winked at Cal, her eyes an invitation into a big candy-striped tent that smelled like overripe oranges and orchids. “You looking for a port, sailor?” she called.

  “Keep walking, partner,” I told Cal when his head swiveled toward the girl. He gave me a lopsided smile.

  “You’re not the type to let a guy have any fun, are you?”

  “When we’re safe in Arkham and we’ve found Conrad you can have all the fun your immune system can stomach,” I said, with an eye on the girl and her cosmetic-caked face. She reminded me of a cheaper, brassier version of Cecelia.

  Cal made cat noises, and I didn’t hesitate to punch him on the shoulder, though not too hard.

  “If you wanted a date, Aoife, you should have passed me a note or two during Mechanical Engineering,” Cal teased. “There were plenty of school dances we missed our chance for.”

  I snorted. The idea of a respectable boy like Cal with a girl like me was as ridiculous as the idea of him with the girl from the tent. She’d probably be more acceptable to the professors and his parents. Boys were allowed to go wild once or twice.

  “Believe me, Cal, nothing is further from my mind than a date right now,” I told him as I tossed the girl a glare. She waggled her fingers at me before sticking out her tongue. I returned the gesture. I suppose I often don’t leave well enough alone, but Cal was my companion on this little adventure. She could go and find her own.

  We turned a bend in the market’s alleyways and came to a square thronged with people. I paused. I had expected the girls of questionable reputations, accompanied by bandits and vagrants of the type popular with sensational writers. But in actuality, an old pipe fire from a house long ago made wreckage was open to the air, and vendors had set up grills and kettles over the flame. The smell was oaky, earthy, a good cut of meat rubbed with spices. My stomach burbled at the scent, and I was reminded that I’d had to miss supper to come here.

  “Books!” A boy in a checkered cap and an outdated newsie coat, half again as old as I was, shoved himself into my path, chest puffed like a bullfrog’s. “Spell books! Charmed paper! Never needs erasin’! Tinctures! Good for what ails you!” He squinted into my face. “Not much, by the look of it. Face like an angel on you, girlie.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I returned. “You can save your pitch for some superstitious twit who does.”

  “Ain’t no superstitions for sale here, miss,” he chimed back. “All of my charms ’er one hundred percent gen-nu-wine. I’ve got magics in my pen and a witch in my kitchen.”

  “Magic’s not real,” I said. “If you’re so smart, you should know that.” I was trying to seem like someone who wasn’t easily conned, but my voice sounded small against the chatter of the market.

  “Sure, an’ if you really believe that you’d be home in bed.” The kid wrinkled up his nose at me. “I could tell you where to buy a hairbrush instead, maybe. You need it.”

  “Say,” Cal intervened, before I could make a move to strangle the little brat. “Where’s a guy find a guide around here?”

  The boy spat in the dirt near Cal’s feet. “Piss off, townie. I look like I give out help to Proctor-lovers?”

  Cal swiped at him. “You don’t know anything, you little rat.…”

  I fished in my pocket for a half-dollar and held it up. The boy’s eyes gleamed to match. “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Tavis. Thought you said you didn’t have any scratch?”

  I made a second half-dollar join the first. Conrad had liked sleight of hand, though the Proctors frowned on something so close to what heretics considered magic. Tavis was practically panting. “We need a guide out of Lovecraft,” I said. “All the way to Arkham. I have money for that, and you seem like you know how things work around here. Or do you have a big mouth and nothing else?”

  The first thing you learned in the School of Engines—if you want to understand how something works, ask the one who does the dirty job. Gear scrubbers and steam ventors and their foreman were in the pits. They knew their Engine intimately.

  “I do, at that,” Tavis said. He pointed past the pipe fire to a blue tent. “You want old Dorlock back there. He’s a guide, best damn guide in the Rustworks. He could guide steam back into water. He could—”

  I held up a hand, and dropped the two coins into his. I wondered what a pair of silvers bought in the Nightfall Market, besides bad manners from a shyster kid. “That’s fine. And for the record, I like my hair this way.” Truly, I hated it and toyed with chopping it into a modern style daily, but like I said, sometimes I don’t know when to leave it. Besides, I had a feeling Dorlock wasn’t as easily put in his place, and it might well be my last chance to feel in control of things tonight—or ever. Once I found Conrad, I’d have to face running off. I might be expelled. I didn’t think beyond that, because beyond expulsion was a cell in the Catacombs, shock therapy to burn the madness out of me and finally, a place next to my mother. If I lived.

  “Sure there isn’t,” Tavis snorted, brandishing his worn wares again. “And hey, townie,” he said to Cal as we started into the crowd. “You watch your girl. She’s got an edge of the pale on her, that one, and it’s like honey in a beehive down here.”

  I shuddered, feeling like something rotten had touched me. Cal rolled his eyes. “Stupid little runt.”

  “You mean, you don’t feel the urge to be my white knight?” I teased, nudging him in the ribs. “Thought that was your dream job.” This was my idea, and I wasn’t about to let Cal see that second thoughts had started the moment we left the Academy. A good engineer stood behind her plans as sound until they’d been tested and proved otherwise.

  “Like you said, Aoife,” Cal grumbled, sounding for all the world like Professor Swan, “grow up.”

  An edge of the pale. If I’d had more coins to spare, I’d have asked Tavis what he meant. But my mother’s money was precious, and I needed every penny of it for this man Dorlock.

  We skirted the fire and approached where Tavis said the guide lived, my feet slower with each step. Still, I grasped the tent flap firmly and pulled it aside. “Hello?” I peered into the tent, which smelled like a barbershop mixed with cheap liquor. “M-Mr. Dorlock, sir?”

  “Hello!” The voice boomed back, sonorous and clearly used to the stage. Dorlock was entirely bald and sported a handlebar mustache, like a circus strongman. Somehow I had expected our guide to be thin and shady, dark as the shadows he slunk through. But Dorlock would stand out at a Hallows’ Eve carnival.

  “Why look at you, young lady!” he exclaimed. “Aren’t you ripe as a peach!”

  If I were to treat him mathematically, take his measurements, he’d be extraordinarily large—a rolling tub of a man boiling over with cheer. I didn’t see what was so funny.

  “We need a guide,” I said. “We need to leave Lovecraft. Tonight.”

  Dorlock laughed, his kettledrum stomach trembling. “Doesn’t waste any time! Going to grow into one of those modern women, I fear, always in a rush!” He reached out to pinch my cheek, and I ducked. I’d grown an aversion to being touched a long time ago. Nuns will do that to a person.

  “Please, sir,” I protested, trying to keep myself stiff and ladylike, like Mrs. Fortune. “Can you help us, or not?”

  “Of course,” Dorlock boomed. “Of course, of course.” He cross
ed his bare arms over his leather vest and matted chest hair. I tried to look only at his face. “It’s all a question of payment, lassie.”

  I looked back at Cal. “I have fifty dollars,” I said. Cal’s eyes went wide at the mention of the sum. Dorlock’s eyes, by turn, narrowed.

  “Fifty United States American dollars, eh? Well, missy, it won’t buy much Uptown way but down here in the rat hole of the Rustworks, you just might have yourself a deal.”

  I felt crestfallen, realizing at the gleam in Dorlock’s gaze why Cal had looked so alarmed. It was all my money. I should have struck a harder bargain. A boy would have bargained. Conrad probably would have made money on the deal.

  “We’ll leave in an hour or so, to beat the sunrise,” said Dorlock. “Up and down and all around we’ll go. It’ll be a grand adventure for you two kids.”

  “I care less about the adventure than the Proctors,” I said, trying to stay firm.

  “Yeah, and we’re fifteen,” Cal interjected. “We’re not kids.”

  “Of course not, you’re a strapping young lad, aren’t you?” Dorlock chuckled. “Going to feed you up and get you big. Why don’t you go get something from the fires for your lady friend, strapping lad? It’s a long walk down under the ground.”

  I frowned at that. “Ghouls live underground,” I said. Not even Proctors went into the old sewers and railway tunnels, the only “underground” I knew of. The new sanitation system ran on clockwork and didn’t need tending. Nobody went underground. Nobody alive, anyway.

  Dorlock shook his head, brows drawing in like a bank of thunderheads. “You just have a head stuffed full of learning, don’t you, young lady? Worry less. You’ll get wrinkles before your time.” He laughed like he was the chief audience for his own joke.

  I opened my mouth, knowing there was murder in my eyes, but Cal touched me on the arm. “I’ll get you a weenie with chili. If these people even know what one is.” He gave me a small nod before he walked away. I knew that nod—it was the please don’t get us into trouble nod. If Dorlock was responsible for us not getting arrested, mouthing off would just be stupid.

  As it turned out, the Nightfall Market didn’t possess any weenies or any chili to put on them, and Cal ended up standing in line to buy us two newspaper cones full of fish-and-chips. I sat on the fender of a Nash jitney that had rusted to chrome and bones next to Dorlock’s tent, where I could keep Cal in sight. Dorlock grinned at the white of my knees, and I pulled my skirt down over them.

  “You do look sweet,” Dorlock said, reaching to push the hair out of my face. “Beauty soon fades, down here. You’re a rare treat.”

  I glared up at him, knowing the knot in my throat that had started when he grabbed for me wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. “Don’t. We hired you to guide, and that’s all.”

  “I’m just being friendly,” Dorlock said. “Loosen up, lassie.” He laid a hand on my shoulder and I shrunk, but it was like trying to pull myself out of a bear trap. “It’s a long time out of the city, and we might as well get along.”

  Maybe that was the single blessing Nerissa’s madness had given me—I’d never had a mother to teach me smiles and manners, to do what a nice girl would do. I reached up and knocked Dorlock’s hand off my shoulder, hard. “Perhaps I don’t want to get along that way.”

  Dorlock’s pouchy face fell in on itself, anger stealing into his small eyes. Hidden anger, like a snake. The most dangerous type.

  “You don’t have any weight to throw around, lassie. I’m the one watching your hide underground, and it’d behoove you to treat me sweet.”

  Before I could snap back at him, the Nash creaked as someone sat down next to me. “You know, Dorlock, I’m impressed. Behoove is a big word for you.”

  I turned to stare at the stranger and met his eyes. They were silver. His smile was crooked, and his hair was long, swept back with a rash of comb tracks. The stranger’s hand was firm and ridged when he took mine and shook it. “Dean. Dean Harrison. And you might be?”

  I opened my mouth, shut it. I didn’t quite know what to make of the stranger, except that he didn’t seem to care for Dorlock any more than I did, and his hand was warm.

  “I might—” I started.

  “She might be with me.” Cal reappeared, irritably juggling his camp duffel and two helpings of takeaway. I watched Dean tilt his head back and look up to Cal’s considerable knobby-kneed height.

  “Sorry, brother. I didn’t know she was spoken for.”

  “Oh, for the sake of all His gears,” I huffed at Cal. Of all the times for Cal’s tough act, this was the absolute worst. I shook Dean’s hand in return. “I apologize for my friend’s manners. I’m Aoife Grayson.”

  Dean’s eyes and smile were both slow, but there was nothing dumb about them. He took the seconds to memorize everything about my face. I’d seen the same look on master engineers, contemplating a new device or problem. Dean took me in, and he smiled. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Aoife.”

  I returned the smile, writ much smaller. Boys—men—weren’t in the habit of smiling at me. I was odd, and I knew it. The few smiles before Dean’s had lead to pranks, but when I looked Dean in the eye, his pupils just grew wider.

  Cal grumbled, his face turning colors. “Aoife. We need to go with Mr. Dorlock.”

  Dorlock himself had turned a plummy shade of purple, huge hands clenching and unclenching like they wanted for a neck. “Harrison, you little ratlick, what are you doing yakking to my clients? They hired me fair and square—go poach somebody else’s hire, vulture.”

  “Like I was about to bend your girl’s ear on,” Dean said. “You don’t want Dorlock, miss. He pays the barter boys down here to talk him a good game, and he poses the part, but it’s all fancy. Man will have you chumming a ghoul nest inside an hour if you go with him.”

  “Guttersnipe!” Dorlock roared, raising his fist to Dean. “They chose me. Market rule says free hires to all. The sweetheart here and her companion want to go underground, and underground they’ll go.” He didn’t have the false face of a kind old uncle any longer. Rage had turned him crimson.

  “Never knows when to shut his yap, either,” Dean muttered, standing up. His full height was a head shorter than Cal, but Dean was broad and solid where Cal was still disappearing inside his school clothes. Dean’s face wasn’t but a year or two older than mine, but it held a spark of wickedness, a blade-edge of worldly knowledge that a person could only light by seeing too much, too soon. Conrad had the same look. I didn’t trust Dean, but I was starting to like him.

  “Listen, Dorlock,” Dean said. “I’m being a pal and giving you a chance to walk away dignified-like.”

  Dorlock’s nostrils flared. “Or?”

  This time, Dean’s smile wasn’t slow and it wasn’t warm. “Or,” Dean said, “I can show your shame to these nice Uptown folk. You choose.”

  I stepped back to stand by Cal in anticipation of a blow or a knife between the two. Dean had to be crazy, mouthing off to someone the size of Dorlock.

  “You runt,” Dorlock panted, a vein in his temple throbbing like a swollen river. “What do you mean, poaching on this sweet little thing?” He reached for me again, my hair, my cheek, and I swatted at him again. It was like fending off an ungainly octopus.

  “She’s a little young for you, don’t you think?” Dean drawled. “By decades or so?”

  I took another step back, this one involuntary.

  Dorlock let out a yell and pulled a length of pipe with a wrapped handle from his belt. Dean reached into the pocket of his leather coat and brought out a palm-sized black lacquer tube. “You know that saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight?” he asked Dorlock. “Same principle applies, old man. Don’t think I won’t show steel just because we’re in market grounds.”

  “They hired me,” Dorlock rumbled. “You’re just a huckster, kiddo, not worth my time to spit on.” He turned to me with a smile revealing one missing front tooth. “Come on, lassie. Come away from
that trash now and we’ll go down under and on to the country like you wanted.”

  Dean moved just a bit, so that his body was between Dorlock and me. It was an artful move, executed like a dance. “All right, hard road is your road, old man.” He gestured, his leather jacket creaking. “Show her your arm, Dorlock. Show off a little for us here.”

  Dorlock fell silent. “You,” he said to me. “Come on now.”

  “No,” I said, shrinking away from his grasp. “If I’m paying you fifty dollars, you can show your arm.”

  Dorlock sneered. “I don’t need the whingeing of a spoiled schoolgirl,” he said. “Or a deadbeat doper boy who doesn’t know his north from his south.”

  “North,” Dean said, pointing over Dorlock’s shoulder. “True iron in my blood. What’s in yours?”

  “I think you better show us your arm, mister,” Cal said. “See what this guy’s on about.”

  Dorlock balled up his fist, but Dean caught it and turned Dorlock’s great fleshy slab outward. Three straight lines were burned into the skin, puckered and red with trapped infection. Cal grimaced. I didn’t want to move closer, but at the same time I couldn’t resist staring at the pus-filled wounds. They were wide as my wrist, weeping and hideous.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Those, boys and girls, are ghoul kisses,” Dean said. “Comes from the acid on their tongues, when they lay them against you to claim ownership. This fat bastard has a deal with one of the dens downside in the sewer, to deliver fresh meat when he’s able.” He released Dorlock and folded his arms. “Ain’t that right, tubby?”

  I stared at Dorlock, feeling sour creep up the back of my tongue. I’d been ready to hand over my money to a man who’d sell us for meat. Conrad would have seen this. All I’d done was nearly gotten Cal and myself eaten.

  Dorlock’s stomach jiggled with fury, and he let out a roar. Dean stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. “Spare me! Free hires within market bounds, Dorlock, you said it yourself. You want to debate the law, we can take it to the old spider-lady who keeps the books.” He winked at me. “Nice old gal. Bites the head off of you if the verdict don’t come down on your side. Figuratively speaking.”